http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
WHEN a student attending a leadership
assembly convened by the Hillel
organization was asked last month by a
Jewish Telegraphic Agency reporter what
she thought of the event's Israel
advocacy day, the answer was less than
enthusiastic.

While praising the programs, she added
that it was "also kind of hard to swallow because it was so
pro-Israel."

Reading that report, as well as taking into consideration my
own recent encounters with many Jewish students, it
would seem that it isn't going to be easy mobilizing our
college youth to counter a predicted anti-Israel offensive
on American campuses this fall.

Even if many of those undergrads who were prepared to
spend the end of August cooped up in a Poconos resort
with hundreds of other kids are comfortable being
"cheerleaders" for Israel, we've still got a problem.

That student, like some others who were quoted in the
piece, were too ignorant of the history and the politics of
the Middle East to effectively rebut Arab propaganda. And
her diffidence about unabashed Zionist advocacy seemed
to speak for a generation that had been raised to think of
Israel and the Palestinians as two peoples locked in a
struggle in which the combatants are morally equivalent.

PROBLEMS ON CAMPUS
There is no mistaking the fact that waving the
blue-and-white flag at America's colleges and universities is
not exactly a shortcut to popularity.

The trouble lies, in part, from the radical shift in student
orientation since my college days back in the 1970s. Then,
a lack of passion about political causes was distinctly
unfashionable and being a firebrand, even for some rather
disreputable causes, was cool.

Today, I am told, political activism is not synonymous with
being a geek, but it's not exactly its opposite either.

To the extent that politics is a factor in university life, it is
dominated by the sort of insipid left-wing, politically correct
crowd that is far more likely to be sympathetic to the
Palestinians than to Israel.

Thus, if college campuses are to be a major target for
anti-Israel forces in this country, the question is what can
be done to create a generation of students that cares
about Israel in the same way that their predecessors cared
about Soviet Jewry or (in much larger numbers) the war in
Vietnam.

The creators of the Birthright Israel program that brings
American Jewish students to Israel for their first visit to the
Jewish state have one answer - and it seems to be
working well. Free travel is hard to resist, even for those
whose backgrounds are devoid of Jewish knowledge or
affiliation. Happily, the Arab violence that has deterred
most American Jews from visiting Israel hasn't significantly
decreased the demand for seats on Birthright missions.

But as marvelous as that program is, even its most ardent
defenders understand that it is not a panacea for a
problem that is better addressed far earlier in the lives of
Jewish youth.

For the last decade, Jewish communal leaders have
struggled with the question of who will follow them in the
future. The great "continuity crisis" that arose out of the
National Jewish Population Survey of 1990 pointed out the
failures of an American Jewish community whose identity
was based on culture and politics unleavened by faith and
Jewish knowledge.

Raising another generation of Jews with a strong secular
education - but who were Jewishly illiterate - was a
formula that would lead to no one being willing to
contribute money to pay the salaries of Jewish communal
professionals in the future. And that was something taken
seriously.

DAY SCHOOLS' MOMENT
It led to a moment, as one high-ranking Jewish bureaucrat
recently confided to me, when Jewish education was, for
the first time in American Jewish history, pushed to the top
of our priority list.

Day schools around the country multiplied, and Jewish
federations raised their allocations to education.
Strategists and fundraisers started, for the first time,
giving serious thought to the problem of how to make
quality Jewish education available to more than the
wealthy few who could afford the exorbitant tuition of day
schools.

Yet as we prepare for the release this fall of the
long-awaited successor to that famous study, some believe
that the "moment" may have passed.

Here in Philadelphia, though funding for education continues
to be the community's top priority, a previous Federation
president's plan for a "millennium" fund that might have
created a Jewish education safety net was never put into
effect.

The lack of major sponsors for the plan, coupled with flat
fundraising campaigns and the need to find money to fund
programs for the Jewish poor - as well as to help Israel
absorb immigrants - meant that the dream was never
realized.

In the last few years, ardor for more Jewish education
hasn't decreased. But the organized Jewish community
does not appear to be in a position to make a full-time,
quality Jewish-education system a reality. Indeed, Jewish
communal professionals seem to now believe that the
future of fundraising lies in attracting the growing numbers
of interfaith couples.

This means that devoting major resources to a cause that
few believe the intermarried support - like comprehensive
Jewish education - works against day schools.

That's especially ironic because these same Jewish
communal professionals are now confronted with the
problem of how to reinvigorate pro-Israel activism in this
country.

After a few years in which Israel seemed to play a lesser
role in the lives of American Jews, the Palestinian war of
terror and invective against Israel and Zionism is reminding
us that the future of the Jewish state remains integral to
our identities and personal security, whether we live there
or not.

Thus, rather than needing programs that reinforce lesser
support for Israel, we need them now more than ever.

School begins this month, with day schools remaining often
out of the reach of Jewish children whose parents have
moderate incomes. But we should remember that promoting
affordable Jewish education is fundamentally linked to the
prospect of there being future generations of American
Jews who understand how important Israel is to our lives.

Ignoring that truth means assuring ourselves that the
Jewish student activist who is uncomfortable with a
"pro-Israel" message will continue to be the rule - and not
the
exception.